U.S. Lifts Ban on Immigrants With Links to Terrorism

BY Clare Lopez, CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY

Muslim Brotherhood affiliates scored a major victory in their efforts to degrade U.S. national security measures in early February 2014 when the Obama administration decided to override by fiat portions of the U.S. Criminal Code and immigration policy pertaining to individuals who provide “material support to terrorism.”

As published in the Federal Register on February 5, 2014, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State issued a joint notice that, henceforth, certain asylum seekers and refugees who only provided “limited material support” to terrorism would be allowed into the U.S.

The earlier law as written, The Real ID Law of 2005, states quite explicitly that the definition of engaging in terrorist activity includes:

To commit an act that the actor knows, or reasonably should know, affords material support, including a safe house, transportation, communications, funds, transfer of funds or other material financial benefit … to a terrorist organization [emphasis added]

Such activity, no matter how minor, constituted grounds for exclusion from entry to the U.S.

By unilaterally lifting restrictions — without so much as consulting Congress — for those intending immigrants who engaged in “(1) certain routine commercial transactions or certain routine social transactions (i.e., in the satisfaction of certain well-established or verifiable family, social, or cultural obligations), [or] (2) certain humanitarian assistance,” that benefited terrorist organizations, the Obama administration simply overrode existing law. So far, both the judicial and legislative branches of the U.S. government have let the administration get away with it.

According to the Daily Caller, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and Secretary of State John Kerry signed the exemptions despite very real concerns about the legality of the executive branch deciding to ignore aspects of an existing law it doesn’t want to enforce and replacing them with its own guidelines.

Former State Department official and current director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies Jessica Vaughan worried as well that “those evaluating these cases will be ordered to ignore red flags in the applications, especially if the applicant is supported by one of the many advocacy groups that have the ear of senior DHS staff.”

The new policy decree marks a significant win for agents of influence belonging to advocacy groups acting on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood agenda to pursue “civilization jihad” “to destroy Western civilization from within…by [our] hands,” as asserted in the “Explanatory Memorandum,” a key Brotherhood document introduced as evidence in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

As described at some length in “The Islamists’—and their Enablers’—Assault on the Right: The Case Against Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan,” an February 11, 2014 dossier of particulars published by the Center for Security Policy (CSP), it is precisely in executing political influence operations aimed at U.S. national security leadership (whether Republican or Democratic) that the Muslim Brotherhood so excels.

The CSP paper explains in exhaustive detail and with meticulously referenced citations how the Muslim Brotherhood targeted the Republican Party and the conservative movement over a period of years and succeeded in placing senior operatives such as Abdurahman Alamoudi, Sami al-Arian, Nihad Awad, and Khaled Saffuri deep inside senior leadership circles.

It was at those top levels of government—the Executive Branch, the Intelligence Community, and the National Security Council—where critical decision-making took place, especially in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, that set U.S. counterterrorism strategy on a hopeless loop that deliberately avoided, and indeed later would forbid, knowledge about Islamic doctrine, law and scripture as the animating inspiration for Islamic terrorism.

By divorcing the enemy’s core ideology from study of the enemy threat doctrine, Muslim Brotherhood agents of influence succeeded in ensuring that U.S. blood and treasure would be endlessly and fruitlessly expended in Counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare, nation-building exercises and democracy experiments in the most unsuitable places possible: Muslim lands under rule of Islamic law (sharia).

As noted in CSP’s 2010 Team B II Report, “Shariah: The Threat to America,” Americans do pretty well at defending against military-style frontal assaults. We do far less well, though, at either recognizing or countering the “menace posed by jihadist enemies who operate by deceit and stealth from inside the gates.”

And yet it is the latter threat that poses a far more serious threat to open, tolerant societies like ours than the openly terrorist attack like the one that struck on 9/11.

As cited by CSP’s Norquist and Khan report, the Washington Post described the stealthy operating style of the Muslim Brotherhood in a revealing September 11, 2004 front page article, “In Search of Friends Among the Foes.”

Juan Zarate, then-chief of the Treasury Department’s terror finance unit, admitted confusion about the Brotherhood and how it operated through familiar Western business enterprises but with Islamic “philosophy and ultimate objectives” that are antithetical to our own. Through a disciplined strategy and patient willingness to work under the radar for decades, they progress towards specific goals and, ultimately, “conquest through dawah,” as Yousef al-Qaradawi, senior jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood, has put it.

So it has been with the steady campaign to chip away at U.S. counterterrorism legislation and policy, much of it, like the Patriot Act, implemented in the months and years following 9/11.

In his 2007 book, “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated America,” Paul Sperry noted, for instance, that, by securing key positions within the White House, such as the Office of Public Liaison, for Brotherhood operatives like Suhail Khan, access by various Islamic organizations could be controlled.

Likewise, the appointment of Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Muslim Brotherhood front organization in the country, to the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group in 2010, served to place a top Brotherhood operative in a key position from which to influence U.S. counterterrorism policy.

In July 2012, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, joined by four other courageous Representatives, sent letters to the Inspectors General of the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State plus the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, requesting each to investigate the extent of Muslim Brotherhood influence in these respective agencies.

Rep. Bachmann followed up with a sixteen-page letter to Rep. Keith Ellison (who had criticized the investigation request) in which she laid out documented instances of apparent Muslim Brotherhood influence over U.S. policy. These included Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s February 2011 testimony before Congress, in which he described the openly jihadist Muslim Brotherhood as “secular;” drastic, pro-Brotherhood policy initiatives by the State Department, during a period when Huma Abedin, who had been closely involved with the Muslim Brotherhood for years, served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton; and U.S. cooperation with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on a pro-sharia campaign to criminalize the criticism of Islam.

With the 2011-2012 government-wide Great Purge of training curriculum related to fact-based instruction about Islam followed by the wholesale backing for the al-Qa’eda and Muslim Brotherhood-led revolts in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, U.S. policy is far gone along the pathway of acquiescence to a jihad and shariaagenda. When Hani Nour Eldin, member of Gama’at al-Islamiyya, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, was granted a visa in June 2012 to visit the White House in order to petition the National Security Council for the release of Omar Abdel Rahman (the Blind Sheikh), the warning indicators were already well in evidence that the Obama administration was turning the Global War on Terror policy on its head.

Allowing political asylees and refugees known to have provided material support to terrorism to enter the country is yet one more milestone step bringing U.S. policy into closer compliance with sharia objectives—to our great detriment.